Starfighter Mafia Talks 2.5

 Wow, almost 4 years since the last post, yet here we are…

Introduction:

I won Crossroads Classic VI in October 2023.  I'm happy to have won it, and it was my first tournament win beyond the small scale or online stuff, but I don't think it gives me any special insight or credentials into how the game works.  It was a long two days, and so much happened that I don’t trust my memory on a lot of key details, especially from day 1, so I don't want to talk about in-game decisions or make any kind of battle report, or draw any strong conclusions from this particular result.  Any win of a good sized tournament requires some amount of luck in matchup and dice, and some luck in not being punished for a few mistakes you made.  This event, however, was an opportunity to test some ideas.  I'm going to talk about this set of ideas that have been clattering around in my head since my very mid-level results of Worlds in March of 2023, because they informed how I constructed and played the squad I played at Crossroads.  

Prior to Worlds 2023, I had played a fair amount of X-wing 2.5, and thought about it a lot, but I hadn’t played a lot of games back to back, and against a lot of good players in a row.  Playing 10 games in two days (LCQ + Day 1) against solid opponents gives one a lot of exposure to the missions with various matchups and it gave me a chance to internalize some details that I might have thought about in the past, but didn't have extensive experience with.  I started thinking about an idea from military tactics (dangerous, I know, in a board game) called Economy of Force.  Basically, one wants to use the fewest resources possible to accomplish a goal.  For example: the smallest number of soldiers to secure a point on a map, the fewest airplanes necessary to destroy a bridge, the lightest parry necessary to divert a sword thrust, etc.  Using excessive resources depletes what one has available for other goals, using too few simply wastes those resources because the goal is not accomplished.  I thought of a fistfull of possible goals for squads to have, and I schemed up a few squads that I felt contained pieces that allowed those goals to be accomplished efficiently, and I thought I was onto something.  

Then points changed, and I got sidetracked by flying 5 T70s, because I love squads that just have a bunch of dudes that move fast and hit hard, and 5 T70s is pretty close to exactly that.  After a couple dozen games with 5 T70s, though, I felt like I was making very inefficient choices in the game.  Objectives were often bypassed until the mid-game in order to keep guns on target for the opening exchange.  Late game kills were made more difficult because the squad was mostly mid initiative ships and two or three might be required to pin down a damaged target to finish it off.  It was a terrific squad at controlling an area through overlapping arcs of powerful offense, but early game and late game both posed problems.  At one point I started thinking about Economy of Force again, and I started tweaking the 5T70 squad to address the inefficiencies I was seeing with it during my experience.  

Squad goals

First I want to define what I mean by goals in the context of the game of X-wing.  After some consideration and rejection of a few ideas, I think I can make an argument for three distinct tasks that need to be accomplished to consistently win a game of X-wing.  

1. Destroy opposing ships

2. Score objective points

3. Control board areas 

Although I expect we all have an idea what these goals are, I want to define exactly what I mean so I'm not relying on assumed definitions to communicate.  

1.  Destroy opposing ships.  It is about as straightforward as it sounds.  Do you have ships that can put a useful quantity of dice on important targets with a high enough frequency that ships are reliably removed in the course of the game?  I'm going to separate this from "jousting efficiency" and similar concepts, because jousting assumes your opponent makes the mutual decision to engage.  Capability in this goal includes killing targets that are actively trying to avoid engagement.  

2. Score objective points.  This is also a pretty straightforward goal. You need to do the things laid out in the missions that add to your points total.  

3. Control board areas.  Have things you can do that makes an opponent not want their ships to be in certain areas.  This goal is all about delivering consequences to your opponent for going after goals 1 and 2.  It can be provided via area denial effects like bombs or ability limiting effects like Death Troopers, but it is most commonly provided by the threat of meaningful damage, aka, shooting stuff.  I split this off from "destroy opposing ships" because the method and purpose are often different.  A ship that is very good at precisely delivering attack dice to a target in a large number of possible positions is not necessarily the same as a ship that makes an opponent immediately regret their decisions to move a ship into a place on the board, although there can definitely be overlap.  Thinking about it another way, goals 1 and 2 are about scoring points to move toward the game's victory conditions.  Goal 3 is about making it difficult for your opponent to pursue those victory conditions.  "You can claim that objective, but…", "You can chase my ship, but…", etc.

There's no inherent reason why a ship can't be strong in all three areas.  The purpose of this discussion is not to tell anyone what they should bring.  The idea I want people to consider is how they accomplish these goals with efficiency.  How do you do any of these without taking away from your ability to accomplish other goals?  This is a positioning and game state decision making question as much as it is a squad composition question.  

Efficiently accomplishing a goal:  A comparison between similar squads

While enough ships can get any of these three goals done, it will be difficult for any assortment of ships to accomplish these goals efficiently.  To illustrate my meaning, I'm going to compare two squads with some overlapping ships that interact with these goals in very different ways:  Ello/Snap/Doza/Kare/Jess (5X) and Poe/Ello/Snap/Jess/BB8 (Poe+4) both have 5 ships, both share Ello, Snap, and Jess, but the second squad plays much more efficiently, in my experience.  Let's look at the three goals again, comparing how 5X and Poe+4 approach these goals.

1.  Destroy opposing ships

5X is composed of principally mid initiative ships.  While they are very points efficient for the level of offense they bring, they are not universally able to direct their fire precisely.  In early game engagements, the number of ships and obstacles limiting the number of angles an opposing squad can attack through make them very effective at damaging or destroying opposing ships.  Later in the game, however, when damaged ships are actively trying to avoid combat, 5X has a harder time tracking those ships down due to lower initiative and a set of repositioning capabilities that is not optimal for retaining offense.  Often 2 or 3 ships (8-12 points worth of ships) are required to cover all the areas a target might be.  This leaves fewer ships available to claim objectives or counter attacks by other ships in the opposing squad.  With Poe+4, however, Poe is a high initiative ship with a wider range of repositioning actions that can be combined with offensive actions.  He has better information to respond to opposing ship positions, and he has more maneuvering options to attack those ships.  If he has taken significant damage he also is exceedingly unlikely to be killed before he delivers a shot, a concern with lower initiative T70s.  Poe’s presence allows a player to commit only 6 points of the squad toward finishing off key opposing ships, destroy those ships more reliably, and take advantage of information timing to re-task if the original goal is found to be impractical that turn.  Yes, I’ve taken a whole paragraph to say that i6 repositioning aces are good.  What a luminary I am.  

2. Score Objective Points.  

When playing 5T70s, early objective claiming requires you to commit one fifth of your firepower.  Considering that 1-2 ships may have their arcs dodged, and the first shot may be negated by spending defensive tokens, you might be losing significantly more than a fifth of your firepower during the phase of the game where it is most important, the initial exchange.  Those consequences can cause a player to pass up early objective points in favor of retaining a coherent critical mass of firepower (the “score kill points, then grab objectives” game plan of 5T70s).  It can be an effective plan, but it is a compromise, and does not optimally maximize the points available to be scored in a game.  With Poe+4, however, BB8 can be tasked with objective points while allowing 90% of your firepower to be used for hunting opposing ships or area control.  With one action or by being in one position, he can earn 1 point while costing 2 points.  In a few turns, he can easily make his points cost just on objectives.

3. Control Board Areas.

5T70s is one of the best squads at controlling board areas, because it has five offensively effective ships with the speed to get somewhere important and the defensive profile to survive more than a turn (or even a single shot).  Poe+4 has only four ships fitting this description, plus the Jam offered by BB8 if he is close to an opposing ship.  The squad still has a strong ability to deal game altering damage when an opposing ship enters multiple firing arcs, so it is not weak at board control, it is simply not as strong as 5T70s.  Poe+4 is good at this goal, rather than exceptional.

In fact, “good, not exceptional” is how I would categorize Poe+4 in its ability to pursue all three of these squad goals, which sounds like damning with faint praise.  The advantage of this, however, is that it is sufficient to pursue all of these goals simultaneously.  The squad can score mission points, while threatening key board areas, while being able to target and remove key opposing ships.  This allows adaptation to a wide array of opposing squads, missions, and obstacle/objective placements.  The ships themselves support this flexible and unspecialized approach.  While Poe is solid at delivering damage to specific targets, and BB8 is an efficient objective runner, Poe can also remain with the other T70s to help control an area and BB8 can use his good mobility to block and/or jam and/or get range 1 shots, supporting that goal as well.  Likewise, the T70s have sufficient durability to perform objective actions without risking immediate destruction and the mobility to get to objectives.  Snap and Ello, in addition, can effectively hunt down key ships, although the breadth of ships they can accomplish this task against is smaller than Poe’s.  The squad has a combination of ships with enough specialization to allow efficient pursuit of specific goals while retaining the flexibility to support the specialists with other ships as the game state demands it.  

Conclusion

I don’t want people to read this analysis and think I’m telling everyone to “take an ace, take a cheap guy, take some jousters”.  That is one option (the option I tried), but there are a lot of ways to go about this.  The point I’m trying to make is to figure out how whatever squad you use can accomplish these three goals in a way that does not compromise its ability to pursue the other goals.  If you find yourself doing more poorly than you want, however, consider if you have a squad that is overspecialized in one area, without the flexibility to pursue more than one goal at once.